Since there are only 2 unknowns, you should be able to make a surf plot of the resnorm function to see approximately where the minimum will be. You can then use that as your initial guess for lsqcurvefit.
I suspect that you are initializing nowhere near the correct value of x(2). If x(2)*F contain very large values, the exponential on the right hand side of
Y = x(1)*exp(-x(2)*F);
will just underflow to zero and your resnorm function will look locally flat.
